Teaching Students to Think for Themselves Is Never Apolitical

My nomination for the most predictable platitude invoked by university professors to describe the essence of their job is “teaching students to think for themselves.”

During my twenty-six years at the University of Texas at Austin, where I was sometimes accused of politicizing the classroom, I repeated that phrase many times, not as a dodge but because I believed it was the right goal.

As with many platitudes, the problem is not that it is incorrect. Rather, it is inadequate. Teaching “critical-thinking skills” is at the heart of good teaching, but that phrase offers little guidance on how to do the job, especially in the social sciences and humanities. (I taught in a journalism school, which typically is a mix of those two traditions.)

I never met a professor—liberal, conservative, or centrist—who thought the job was to propagandize students, to push a particular belief system. But every professor makes decisions about topics covered, readings assigned, and the direction of class discussions in the limited time available, all of which require judgments that inevitably reflect a way of seeing the world. Call it a framework of analysis, a worldview, an ideology—no one understands human affairs in a purely objective fashion, without underlying assumptions about how the world works.

In short: Teaching is not politics, but there is always an underlying political current to teaching about human affairs because there is inescapably a politics to living. By politics, I do not mean partisan battles but, rather, competing claims about human nature, how to distribute power, what constitutes a good society, et cetera. In that sense, a form of politics pervades everything people do, whether stated or implicit. The question, therefore, is whether we can make a good case for the choices we make, which will inevitably be politically inflected.